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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

blog.strml.net

31–40 of 403 posts

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#33
post #3

Oh god, please change the title. It's about timers, not bandwidth. I was already imagining streaming music from Spotify and having hiccups all day.

They throttle timer activation frequency if you use too much CPU time (with the goal of throttling CPU usage). How is the title not accurate?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#35
post #20

I like the change as a general idea but there obviously needs to be a manual override. Like, I don't want websites to access my camera without permission but obviously I want to allow some websites to do that. A similar permission could be used here and is perfectly backwards compatible: 1. a tab exceeds its quota and throttling kicks in; 2. you visit the tab to check why it stopped working; 3. you get a permission p…

This would be great. At the very least, I'd like the power to un-throttle a tab myself if I decide to do so - even if there's no prompt, it's important to me that I can let a process run full-speed in the background. Losing that would actually decrease the value of Chrome quite a bit for me.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#37
post #20

I like the change as a general idea but there obviously needs to be a manual override. Like, I don't want websites to access my camera without permission but obviously I want to allow some websites to do that. A similar permission could be used here and is perfectly backwards compatible: 1. a tab exceeds its quota and throttling kicks in; 2. you visit the tab to check why it stopped working; 3. you get a permission p…

It could also be a permission granted to a Progressive Web App once the user has decided to install it.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#38
post #5

Can we aggressively throttle memory usage? Why does it require 300-500MB of ram PER TAB?

It probably doesn't. Measuring memory usage is hard on a modern OS. I'd guess there's a lot of shared memory between tabs

> Measuring memory usage is hard ...

Exactly, I usually find that chrome is eating a little more than what it's displayed in task manager in windows ;) I have no idea how it can achieve that to be honest. Restarting it seems to bring back the 5-15% missing ram in my case.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#39
post #5

Can we aggressively throttle memory usage? Why does it require 300-500MB of ram PER TAB?

Does Chrome only use RAM if it thinks it is available? (i.e. if it starts detecting that other process are running and eating up RAM, will it use less?)

Nope - it's fairly happy to choke everything else or even crash (tabs or the browser) when RAM gets too scarce. It does seem to have some capability to restrict usage, but it's not thorough enough to avoid performance/crashing issues.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#40

So you get to use 1% CPU, effectively. The timer test seems strange, why was your "simple setInterval" using so much more than 1% CPU?

No, you don't get to use 1% CPU. That would still work. The problem is that you get to use 100% of CPU but only 1% of the time.
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